Isaiah 27:12-13. These two verses come at the end of a chapter that begins with God promising "in that day" to use his great, strong sward to punish Leviathan, the fleeing, twisting serpent. So that is the "day" that Isaiah is talking about when he says in these verses "In that day ... the Lord will thresh out the grain, and you will be gathered one by one, O people of Israel." A great trumpet will be blown in that day and any who were lost in the lands of Assyria or Egypt will come back to worship the Lord on the holy mountain in Jerusalem.

This is "the gathering" part of the biblical story arc - the punishment of the powers that have harmed God's people and the seeking out and gathering back of each of his children. The general story arc goes - God blesses his people with abundance; the people rejoice and praise God for his goodness; the people get too used to the abundance and they start to forget that it came from God; outside influences seep in and the people start following other "gods" (which can be anything from actual idols, to other religions, to secular beliefs, to self-worship, to money and status, to politics or political leaders, and the list goes on); eventually these false gods lead the people so far astray they begin committing all kinds of abominations; God starts trying to warn the people to come back to him through prophets and priests; if the people listen, then they go back to step one - God blesses them with abundance again; if they do not listen, eventually they will fall - either to a foreign power or into their own destruction and despair; once they suffer long enough to realize how good they had it when they worshiped God, they turn back to him and worship him even in the midst of their suffering; God relents, punishes those who hurt his people, and gathers his people back home.<-------- (We are here in this reading.:)

When Isaiah says "the Lord will thresh out the grain and you will be gathered one by one" he is reminding us how important we each individually are to God - he wants to bring back every single one of us! Jesus told us the same story when he talked about the shepherd leaving his flock to find the one missing sheep. That is how much God loves us and how important we each are to him.

Because the world is so big and can seem so cold and heartless, we sometimes forget how important we each are to God. It is easy to think "My small sins don't matter - look at what those other people are doing," or "No one really cares about me or what I am up to, not even God - he has much bigger things on his plate." But that diminishes both God and us. God, of course, has the ability to be concerned with the tiniest detail of every single life, and he is! And each of us is so vitally important to God that he would come would have come and died for us even if we were the only person on earth.

So we should be living each of our days as if it were "that day" - the day the Lord will come to thresh the grain. We want to be one of the ones he gathers - one by one - to bring home. He wants that for us too.